Roland crisscrossed Europe like an evangelist proselytizing among the unconverted. With Howard Jordan, his personal assistant, and Leo Rosenek, his accompanist, who was an up-and-coming pianist and later a conductor, Roland traveled from Vienna to Graz and from Budapest to Karlsbad, channeling his mourning into exquisite performances. Countess Marguerite Hoyos, daughter of Austro-Hungarian nobility, had heard and met Roland in Vienna. She was so moved by his performance she wrote a letter to her friend Countess Bertha Henriette Katharina Nadine Colloredo-Mansfeld enthusiastically suggesting that she call on this new tenor sensation when he debuted in Prague.1

The thirty-six-year-old tenor arrived in Prague in October 1923. He retreated to a comfortable hotel suite, unaware of the social currents eddying in the capital of the five-year-old Czechoslovak Republic. Politics permeated the city, and the art scene was no exception. Concertgoers from all levels of society flocked to music halls, each group wary, if not suspicious, of others in attendance. The tension was as palpable as the situation was complex. Industrialized Czechs holding economic advantage over rural Slovaks vigorously championed the unifying virtues of the common language they shared.2 The German minority, despite the downfall of the Hapsburg Empire, kept a tight grip on their economic interests by closely guarding what remained of their old cultural influence.3

Evidential arguments from evil against the existence of God often take the following form:

1. If God exists, there is no gratuitous evil, that is, evil which God would have no morally sufficient reason to allow.

2. But there is gratuitous evil.

3. So God does not exist.

They are evidential because of the nature of the arguments given for the second premise. Those arguments are probabilistic or epistemic in nature, starting from the fact that even after careful reflection we see no morally sufficient reason for God to allow certain kinds, instances, amounts, or patterns of suffering or from that suffering itself. And they move from those starting points to the conclusion that there is gratuitous evil either by induction or by abduction, that is, by an inference to the best explanation. We can capture these four kinds of evidential arguments from evil by means of the following matrix:

William Rowe has given a version of the evidential argument from evil that is in category (1). He argues that because the goods we know of provide no morally sufficient reason for allowing certain instances of suffering, we have good reason to believe that no goods provide such reason and hence good reason to believe that allowing the suffering is not morally justified. Critics have responded that our knowledge that the goods we know of do not justify allowing the suffering gives us reason to believe that no goods do only if we have good reason to believe that the sample of goods we know of is a representative sample, and we have no good reason to believe it is.2 An argument that has been given to show we have no reason to believe the sample is representative is that “goods beyond our ken have no chance of belonging to Rowe’s sample [of goods which could justify allowing the suffering]; so the sample is not random.”3

On a day I stood leaning against ye side of our Kitchen with my face toward our dwelling I was so struck with the scene that I imagined in my mind, Could but some Ingenious Artist have a sight of it twould certainly make a curious Picture, as thus. First was to be seen the mouth of a large Cavern, somewhat resembling a very high Cathedral door way excep the arch much wider. On the right hand was to be seen My Betty with Patty sitting behind her braiding her long black hair. A little without the Cave enterance was to be seen my Young Owen taking aim at his Uncle Harry, who stood on the other side of the enterance with his back against the Rock as a kind of Butt for him, and catching the Arrows as they came in his hand; Somer sitting against the side of the rock within, with his red pipe in his mouth, tayloring with an old dutch cap faced with furr on his head; Eva recieving a bole of Stewed fish from Young Jessy before the door. N.B. We wore but little cloathing when within doors, the Girls seldom any more than a short breetch cloth.—My Self as sitting about the Center within at my table, Writing, the table covered with a piece of Sail Cloth; Patty with her young child slung at her back with a scrip of cloth; the two dogs and Cat before the door way; and our Parrot cage on one side of the Cave, but the Birds on the top of it in general, the cage oblong and square. From a chinck in the Rock projected a long stick with an other to sloop toward it, whereon Moggy the Macaw bird was in general to be seen. Over the Cavern was to be seen huge rocks overhung with trees excep a place wher stood our flagstaff, the flag about 7 feet long and 5 deep consisting of only two stripes, the upper blue and the under white.

ON MAY 11, 1995, a coalition of political opposition leaders in Ghana known as the Alliance for Change organized a demonstration they called Kum-me-preko (Kill me once and for all). The immediate cause of this protest was President Jerry Rawlings’s decision to implement a new 17.5 percent value-added tax (VAT) on goods and services. Rawlings enacted the new tax in an attempt to meet the requirements of Ghana’s “structural adjustment program”—a series of drastic policy changes mandated by debt-holding international finance institutions (IFIs). The VAT was intended to make up for the loss of revenues caused by the concurrent lowering of the corporate tax rate and the elimination of import and export tariffs. In effect, these tax reforms were designed to shift revenue burdens away from large-scale businesses and toward consumers, thereby creating a more inviting climate for private investment in Ghana.1 Unsurprisingly, the new tax policy immediately came under fire from labor unions and the general public for increasing the tax burden on the poor and in some cases catapulting the prices of goods and services out of the reach of ordinary citizens. The organizers of the Kum-me-preko protest called the VAT a “gruesome policy measure.”2

One of the most important and powerful of hopes is the hope invested in the possibility of living a morally sound, good, and God-fearing life. While the moral aims that people strive for may appear clear, and even grand, the actual pursuit of those aims is far from straightforward. The same young men who think that hashish is the best way to escape boredom and who resort to shortcuts in order to kill time and make money also believe in revivalist Islam’s promises of a meaningful life now and paradise in the hereafter, and they strive to act as respected and successful members of their family and society. As we look at the actual ways in which ideological grand schemes are made use of in everyday life, ambivalence is essential and often necessary. These uses may evoke a comprehensive discipline, whereas what they actually accomplish is something at once more complex and simple: an instantaneous sense of direction in a confusing and dull reality.

It is common knowledge that religious, moral, and other ideals are never fully realized in everyday life. A frequent explanation for this is the tension between moral ideals, on the one hand, and desire, interests, and power, on the other hand. In other words, people are either weak (from a more sympathetic perspective) or hypocritical (from a less sympathetic perspective). A more sophisticated version of this would point out that people are subjected to regimes of power that may contradict the ideals of moral personhood they hold, thereby leaving them suspended in between different moral traditions. In any version, this explanation is based on the assumption that people have a consistent idea on their own about what is good and right. This, however, is seldom the case in practice.